RIT Joins Statewide Cyberinfrastructure Initiative

Rochester Institute of Technology joins 18 other institutions from across New York state to create NYSGrid, a 21st century cyberinfrastructure initiative. This collaboration provides RIT and its partners with unprecedented resources for research, education and community outreach.

“The digital revolution is data driven and has permeated all aspects of society—from resource to education, from entertainment to doing business,” says Russ Miller, NYSGrid executive director. “NYSGrid will provide researchers, teachers, students and communities with the tools needed to navigate and excel in our data-driven, knowledge-based economy.”

Cyberinfrastructure sits at the core of modern simulation and modeling, which creates entirely new methods of investigation, allowing scholars to address previously unsolvable problems. NYSGrid takes advantage of recent advances in technologies that link physically distributed resources into computational grids.

“The advantages to consolidating New York’s centers of expertise through the NYSGrid initiative are significant to both researchers and students, “ states Diane Barbour, RIT’s chief information officer. “Users can more easily collect, manage, organize, analyze and visualize data without having to focus on the logistics associated with how that data is processed. This has the potential to expedite important advances in areas related to science and engineering.”

Joining RIT as founding institutions for this grassroots initiative are the University at Albany, Alfred University, Binghamton University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University at Buffalo, Columbia University, Cornell University, SUNY Geneseo, the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, Marist College, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Niagara University, NYSERNet, New York University, the University of Rochester, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stony Brook University and Syracuse University.

Significant progress has already been made in establishing a working grid that includes many of these institutions. User groups are in the process of being identified, training sessions are being designed, middleware developers are being organized and the mission and organizational structure is being developed and refined.